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How to Use Custom VM Icons in the vSphere 5 Client

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Ever get tired of the same old virtual machine icons in the vSphere Client? Ever thought about changing it? Well with vSphere 5, you can! Here is a screenshot of some the custom icons I added for several virtual machines in my development lab.

One of the major enhancement in the vSphere 5 API is the introduction of the vCenter Solutions Manager, vSphere ESX Agent Manager, and vServices SDK. These various interfaces allows ISVs, partners and end users to easily extend the functionality of the vCenter Server and provide solutions that are tightly integrated via extensions/plugins that are aware of features such as vSphere HA, DRS and DPM.

Here what each of the interfaces provides:

vCenter Solutions Manager - is a view in the vSphere client where you can monitor and interact with the solutions that register with a vCenter Server instance. Solutions Manager shows three standard tabs for each running solution. The tabs list the virtual machines that a solution deploys and manages, show the health, name, company URL, version of the solution, and show any vServices that the solution provides.
vSphere ESX Agent Manager - automates the process of deploying and managing vSphere ESX agents. The services that ESX Agent Manager provides include out-of-the-box integration of agents with vSphere features such as DRS, AddHost, High Availability, DRM, and maintenance mode. All of these features can be difficult to integrate with manually. ESX Agent Manager also allows users to monitor the health of ESX agents, and blocks users from performing certain operations on ESX agents that might affect the virtual machines that use them. For example, ESX Agent Manager can prevent an ESX agent virtual machine from being powered off or moved from an ESX host that contains other virtual machines that use that agent.
vServices SDK - is a service that a solution provides to specific applications that run inside virtual machines and vApps. A solution can provide several types of vServices. Virtual machines or vApps can have dependencies on several types of vServices. A vService is similar to a virtual hardware device upon which virtual machines and vApps can depend. Instead of providing a piece of virtual hardware, vServices typically provide access to a service across a network. By providing a vService, a solution can expose application-aware services to virtual machines and vApps. For example, a vService can provide a backup service or a logging service to virtual machines and vApps.
For more details about these interfaces and how to implement them, take a look at the documentation here.

Even though these APIs are really meant for ISVs and partners to consume, if you would like to add a splash of color to your environment, you can use the following trick. At at high level we will be adding a new extension(s) which includes a mapping of a particular solution (e.g. logical name) to a particular icon that a virtual machine or vApp can be associated with. The icons must be 16x16 PNG format referenced by a URL. Once the custom extension has been created, you will then need to reconfigure the virtual machine(s) and associate the managedBy property to the solution's logical name key to update the virtual machine's icon.

You will need access to either the vCLI or vMA and the following two vSphere SDK for Perl scripts: registerCustomSolution.pl and updateVMManagedBy.pl You will also need access to vCenter Server 5 as this is not supported on an ESXi 5 host.

There is a very simple example in registerCustomSolution.pl which creates two extensions: one that includes custom icons and tabs that can link to any webpage (vGhetto) and one that only includes custom icons (Custom Application). You will need to edit the script so it fits your environment and there is a special variable in the script called "editedScript" which is set to 0 that prevents the script from running. This will ensure you do not accidentally create these extensions based on information in my development environment. Once you have updated the script, go ahead and change the value to a 1.

When you are ready, you will use the registerCustomSolution.pl script to create the extensions, here is an example:

To verify that the extensions were created properly with the information you provide, you can use pluginExtensionManager.pl to list all registered extensions. The command is the following: ./pluginExtensionManager.pl --operation list

You should see at the bottom of the output the extensions that were just registered and the associated configurations URL + icons. It is important to make note of the extension key (e.g. com.vmware.vGhetto) and the solution type string as that will be needed in the next section.

Now all we need to do is associate a particular virtual machine with the solution to update the virtual machine's default icon. You will use the updateVMManagedBy.pl script and using the extension key and type from the output from the previous screen.

To verify the icons have been updated, you will need to login to the vCenter Server and check out your virtual machines.You will also notice that on the right hand side of the virtual machine summary screen, there is a new "Managed By" section which includes a link to the vCenter Solution Manager.

Note: If you would like to reset or revert back to the original icons, you just need to use the  updateVMManagedBy.pl script and specify a empty string for the key. If you would like to unregister and remove the extension all together, you can use pluginExtensionManager.pl and perform remove operation.

Another way to view all the vCenter Solutions is on the home page and by clicking on the vCenter Solutions Manager icon.

From here you will see all registered vCenter extensions including some information about the vendor, version and health of the extension.

Here is a drill down into one of the extensions that contains several tabs to some URLs

As you can see, you can link to some useful URLs that can easily be accessible through the vSphere Client without having to go to your browser. Another neat feature of the tabs is to include any web management interfaces for a particular solution/vApp so that you can easily configure and manage the system from a single pane of glass.

In addition to this, you can also get a summary of the registered virtual machines with a given solution by clicking on the "Virtual Machines" tab and selecting "Managed By" box, the "Server" and "Agents" are reserved for ESX Agents.

There are also two caveats to be aware of if you decide to create custom icons for your virtual machines. The first is when you edit a virtual machine, you will get an annoying pop-up that states changes to the solution is not recommended. Under normal circumstance, where a solution/extension is provided by a 3rd party, you definitely do not want to manually tweak the virtual machine but in this scenario, it is fine.

The second thing I noticed is the custom icons do not properly show up in the nextgen vSphere Web Client, a default icon is used instead for virtual machines who have custom icons. I am not sure if this is a display bug with the vSphere Web Client or with the APIs.

So there you have it, if you are bored at looking at the same old icons and would like to differentiate some or all of your virtual machines, you now have the option to use custom icons.

Duncan's 50 out of 140 vSphere 5 Features Challenge

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You may have heard that vSphere 5 has officially launched today (well last night ~7pm-ish PST), but you may not know, that there are over 140 new features introduced in this release. Duncan Epping shared a blog post vSphere 5.0 Features detailing a list that was generated internally from VMware on the 140 features. Duncan also provided a challenge to the readers:

Now before we will give you the full list we want to challenge you... Who will be the first one to show 50 of the below listed features in an article? We will give a "vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive" book signed by both authors to the first 5 people who manage to write a single article detailing 50 of the below features with short paragraph about what this feature brings including a screenshot.

Even though I had already purchased the colored copy of vSphere 5.0: Clustering and Technical Deepdive which I am still trying to finish (only half way done), I decided to accept Duncan's challenge and here is my list of the 50 features I decided to write about.

Note: I personally have not worked with all 50 features listed below, some of these were selected due to ease of capturing a screenshot.

[Read more...]

New Application Awareness API in vSphere 5

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Application Awareness HA is not a new feature in vSphere 5, it has actually has been around since vSphere 4.1. With this feature, vSphere HA can monitor heartbeats generated from an application monitor within the guestOS and reboot the virtual machine.

What is actually new in vSphere 5 is the availability of the Application Awareness API for anyone to consume and integrate into their own application and/or script. Prior to this, the API was only exposed to ISV and 3rd party vendors with solutions such as Symantec's ApplicationHA and Neverfail's vAppHA.

The Application Awareness API (will be shorthanded as AAA, going forward) is supported in both Linux and Windows (32/64bit) and can be accessed by installing a package within the guestOS. This package includes the necessary AAA libraries to create your own program/scripts in C, C++, Java and Perl. In addition, the package also includes a pre-compiled binary (vmware-appmonitor) that implements all the AAA methods that can easily be called from within a script or program. AAA uses the VMware Tools as communication channel to the ESX(i) host and you will need to ensure VMware Tools is installed and running. Since the communication is between VMware Tools and the ESX(i) host, there is no reliance on a TCP/IP network for this communication channel.

UPDATE: You can download GuestAppMonitor SDK here.

There are currently 6 AAA methods:

  • VMGuestAppMonitor_Enable()
    • Enables Monitoring
  • VMGuestAppMonitor_MarkActive()
    • Call every 30 seconds to mark application as active
  • VMGuestAppMonitor_Disable()
    • Disable Monitoring
  • VMGuestAppMonitor_IsEnabled()
    • Returns status of Monitoring
  • VMGuestAppMonitor_GetAppStatus()
    • Returns the current application status recorded for the application, three possible values:
      • green = Virtual machine infrastructure acknowledges that the application is being monitored.
      • red = Virtual machine infrastructure does not think the application is being monitored. The
        HA monitoring agent will initialize an asynchronous reset on the virtual machine if the status is Red
      • gray = Application should send VMGuestAppMonitor_Enable again, followed
        by VMGuestAppMonitor_MarkActive, because either application monitoring failed, or the virtual machine was vMotioned to a different location
  • VMGuestAppMonitor_Free()
    • Frees the result of the *_GetAppStatus() call (only required when writing your own program)

Here is the basic workflow for using AAA within your application:

Check_if_enabled();
If not enabled, set enabled
Monitor application
If application is good, send heartbeat

Wait 15 seconds
Loop

To start using AAA functionality, you will first need to have a vSphere HA enabled cluster and enable the "VM and Application Monitoring" under VM Monitoring.

You have the ability to configure the sensitivity of AAA from Low, Medium and High which correlates to the heartbeat interval and frequency of virtual machine reboots. You also have the option of configuring your own custom policy.

Lastly, you can choose which virtual machines will be included in VM Monitoring and/or Application Monitoring.

Note: It is important to note, that HA will expect an application heartbeat to be generated every 30secs. If HA fails to receive a heartbeat within 30secs, it will transition the appHeartbeatStatus state from green to red. Depending on the configured sensitivity policy, once the heartbeat interval has been violated, HA will then restart the virtual machine. For example, if you have the sensitivity configured to medium and a heartbeat was not received within 30secs, it will change to a red state. If HA still has not received a heartbeat within 60secs of that time, then it will reboot the virtual machine.

Here is an example of installing AAA on a Linux system and compiling the C sample program:

Step 1 - Copy the AAA package to Linux system and extract the contents

Step 2 - Change into VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK/docs/samples/C/ and ensure you have gcc compiler. You may have to change the makefile if you are on a 64bit platform as it is configured by default to point to the 32bit library. When you are ready, just type "make" and you should get compiled binary called "sample" which is the sample C application

Before you run the application, you need to ensure that your shared library path variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH has been updated to include the libappmonitorlib.so. To update the variable, you will run the following command:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/full/path/to/VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK/lib64

Step 3 - You can now run the "sample" application which runs in a continuous loop and automatically enables AAA within the virtual machine and sends heartbeats to ESX(i) host. You can press control+C which then brings up three options: stop (s), disable (d), continue (c). The last two options should be pretty straight forward, but if you decide to stop the heartbeating and you don't resume, you will see HA restart the virtual machine based on your cluster configuration.

As you can see, once the heartbeats have not been received within the specified interval, HA will take action and reboot the virtual machine as expected. Here is a detail of the events as seen by vCenter and the HA cluster:

Here is an example of installing AAA on a Windows system and using the pre-compiled vmware-appmonitor binary:

Step1 - Copy the AAA package to Windows system and extract the contents 

Step 2 - Launch a cmd prompt and change into C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK-457765\VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK\bin\win64 directory. Depending if you are on a 32/64bit OS, you will need to modify the win{32,64}

Step 3 - Run the vmware-appmonitor.exe which will then provide you with options: enable, disable, markActive, isEnabled, getAppStatus

Note: The options in vmware-appmonitor for both Linux and Windows are exactly the same, this is very nice for consistency and scripting purposes. Just like with the direct use of the API, you need to first run the enable command to turn on Application monitoring and then run the markActive command which sends the heartbeats. You can always check the current heartbeat status by running getAppStatus or check whether AAA is enabled by running isEnabled command

As a reference, here are the paths to the vmware-appmonitor for both Linux and Windows:

  • VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK/bin/bin{32,64}/vmware-appmonitor
  • VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK-457765\VMware-GuestAppMonitorSDK\bin\win{32,64}\vmware-appmonitor.exe

For those of you who are not into programming languages such as C,C++ and Java, here is an example using Perl. In the example, the script simulates the monitoring of an application by checking whether or not a file exists. The script starts off by creating a file that will monitored and then loops for 5 minutes and checks for the existence of the file. Once the 5 minutes are up, the script then disables Application monitoring and exits.

Note: You will need to set the two variables at the top which define the path to the shared library and the vmware-appmonitor binary.

So far we have demonstrated on how to setup AAA within the guestOS and provided a variety of programming/scripting interfaces such as C,C++, Java and Perl to integrate with your own application/script. Now what if we wanted to extract the heartbeat status for all virtual machines that have AAA implemented going through vCenter? You can easily do so by using the vSphere API and querying the appHeartbeatStatus property of your virtual machine.

I wrote a very simple vSphere SDK for Perl script getVMAppStatus.pl that allows you to query a virtual machine connecting to either vCenter or directly to an ESX(i) host to extract the heartbeat status.

Download the getVMAppStatus.pl script here.

The script can return three different status: gray, green or red and the definition for each is defined above.

Now before you jump right in and start leveraging this awesome API in either a custom application or script, you need to understand your application and various ways on detecting that it has failed and when you would like vSphere HA to reboot the virtual machine. Simply checking whether the process is running may or may not be enough.

To get more details on some of the best practices around using the Application Awareness API, I would highly recommend you check out Tom Stephens upcoming VMworld 2011 presentation TEX1928 Implementing Application Awareness in the Web Client and The Uptime Blog for more details about implementing AAA . For now, if you would like to learn more about Application Awareness API, check out last year's VMworld presentation.